Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, maybe most important DJs to expanding 1970s disco era experience into '80s House music and dance club music beyond. I read somewhere they used to hang out together in the classic disco era at David Mancuso's Loft parties, enthralled but also able to share a joke about the hippie vibe on the Loft's dance floor. In light of such gossip let's call "The Whistle" Frankie's LGBTQ+ hippie loving ode to the Loft. It's like a perfect Quiet Storm easy listening jazz flute fantasia, sandwiched between some hooligan-friendly men's whistling choir, and on the bottom an undeniably skipping and softly booming House music smooth dance club tempo. "The Whistle Song" feels like a perfect gay disco homage to the Loft. Even if Frankie had no such intentions, Mancuso had to hear the sincere compliment. First ballot 20th Century Dance Music Hall of Fame.
How does it feel to be on your own? Sifting through the rubble, bringing up the dead, reassembling history from below.
"Beyond the Dance," Rhythm is Rhythm (1989)
Third Generation Disco: David Mancuso to Frankie Knuckles to Derrick May or Rhythm is Rhythm. Invented spacey electro disco sound with collaborating DJ record nerd friends, The Belleville Three, from Detroit; innovating off Kraftwerk's electronic and ambient take on disco. They called their DJ soundsystem business Deep Space Soundworks. "Beyond the Dance" feels trance-y, even possibly psychedelic, a dash of ambient Brian Eno, chill-out dance music (before that became a tired brand) with this relentless buoyancy that hits that endless groove hooky repetition bell again but in a completely different register here: techno grooves, snappy castanets, crude electronics, a droning pinball machine, zen healing melodic cheap synth tones, pulsating, radiating outward like gamma rays. Where four or five minutes in you want the groove to go on forever: Serene, slow building, surging space disco Detroiters called Techno. Now, 2024, only its ambient splendor remains. And I am surprised this hasn't been endlessly looped in some Muzak space, elevator music, or grocery shopping to Rhythm is Rhythm.
TGIDF